EXAMINING THE ROLE OF ‘MODERNISATION’ AND HEALTH-CARE DEMAND IN SHAPING OPTIMAL BREASTFEEDING PRACTICES: Evidence on Exclusive Breastfeeding from Eastern Indonesia

The health benefits to mothers and children in adopting optimal breastfeeding practices are well recognized. However, despite many efforts to promote optimal breastfeeding practices in developing countries, only modest progress has been achieved in past decades.

This paper attempts to fill several important research gaps on the socioeconomic determinants of optimal breastfeeding. In contrast to previous studies that have focused on the timely initiation and duration of breastfeeding, this article examines exclusive breastfeeding practices. Using a new data set from Eastern Indonesia, we revisited the ‘modernisation’ hypothesis and, as a first study in this field, investi- gated to what extent health-care demand and supply factors influence optimal breastfeeding behaviours.

Controlling for a wide range of individual, household, and community characteristics, our findings suggest that mothers’ labour market participation under ‘modern’ employment contracts negatively affects optimal exclusive breastfeeding practices, and hence provide support for the ‘modernisation’ hypothesis. Moreover, our results indicate that a higher availability and quality of health-care supply does not necessarily lead to better breastfeeding practices. Only when health-care supply was matched with a significant demand for such services, did we observe a higher chance for optimal exclusive breastfeeding.